Music

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

(This is a review of the roadshow version of The Hateful Eight,
which will be screening in true 70mm in about 50 theaters across the country
during the first two weeks after the movie’s release on Christmas Day. The same
roadshow version will also screen in other venues digitally rather than on
film. Before the roadshow engagement ends, a slightly shortened version, sans
overture and intermission, will go into general release on December 31, so if you’re interested in seeing
the roadshow version—and if you can, you should see it—read your newspaper or
Internet theater listings carefully.)

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Once upon a time, not so very long ago, a friend and I had a
friendly discussion online about what it was that made a story a “western.” It
seemed to him that, beyond the usual interchangeable trappings of the genre--
six-shooters, ruthless bad guys, conflicted lawmen, a showdown on Main Street
and lots and lots of cattle, et al-- the very placement of the story itself in
America a couple of decades either side of the middle of the 19th
century during which the settlers began moving West itself made the story a western.
He then challenged me to come up with a movie or a TV show that disproved his
premise, which caused me a bit of a struggle before I came up with Little House on the Prairie, a series of
books from whence came the popular TV show about family life in frontier
America— one would hardly call Little
House a western, though it may have occasionally featured a cow or a horse
or a visit from the local lawman.

I thought of this conversation frequently in sorting through
my response to writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s latest, The Hateful Eight, which
despite a post-Civil War setting and being knee-deep in stagecoaches, morally
questionable bounty hunters, big handguns, an assortment of scurrilous,
law-breaking varmints and big, nasty, percolating pots of pitch-black coffee,
is no more a western than the Ingalls family saga was. Turns out that Tarantino
has employed the Ultra Panavision 70 format, a wide-screen process which hasn’t
been used in decades (at an extra-wide aspect ratio of 2.76:1, it is in truth a
Cinerama presentation, and that company’s logo appears before this movie’s
opening credits), to tell what is essentially, once the setup of the first half
hour is complete and the action moves away from the snowy outdoors, a chamber
drama seasoned with more than just a dash of the old ultra-violence, a racially
charged whodunit which owes as much to Agatha Christie as to Sergio Leone and
the countless other references Tarantino throws into the stew.

After an overture highlighting Ennio Morricone’s lush score
(assembled, apparently, from themes written for but eventually discarded from
Morricone’s score for The Thing, with
cherry-picked segments from Morricone’s familiar music for The Thing and Exorcist II:
The Heretic thrown in for good measure), the story commences. One of those
morally questionable bounty hunters, John Ruth (Kurt Russell), is on his way
across a snowy mountain pass in possession of a prisoner, the mean-spirited Daisy
Domergue. (The movie can’t seem to decide whether the name is pronounced
DOM-er-goo or Do-MING-gway, but it does seem to know that she’s played by Jennifer
Jason Leigh.) Domergue’s crimes are initially unclear, but her obviously
psychotic personality and apparent indifference to being punched in the face by
her captor seem to endear her to the hangman’s noose for which she is bound. Their
stagecoach stops to pick up two unexpected passengers—another bounty hunter,
this one an ex-Union officer by the name of Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L.
Jackson), and Chris Mannix, an ex-Confederate raider (Walton Goggins) who
claims to be the newly elected sheriff of the town in which the
prisoner-in-transit is scheduled to be executed.

Once the new passengers are on board (and that process takes
a while, as does most everything in The
Hateful Eight, Tarantino being the self-delighted dawdler he is), the whole
party is forced by an impending storm to stop at a trading post, Minnie’s
Haberdashery, where four other unlucky travelers—a mysterious cowpoke named Joe
Gage (Michael Madsen), Oswald Mowbray, a garrulous hangman (Tim Roth), cranky
Confederate General Sandy Smithers (Bruce Dern) and Bob, the shady caretaker of
the outpost (Damian Bechir)—have already taken refuge. Including the stage’s
nondescript driver (James Parks), that’s a hateful nine, though the late arrival of yet another lawless reprobate tips
the movie’s grand total forward toward 10 and confirms our suspicions (hell, at
three hours and seven minutes, our hopes)
that all is not as it seems to be in this snowbound hotbed microcosm of moral
and racial tension.

And of course all
is not as it seems to be. The problem for me (at least one of them) is that by
the time our presumptions start getting upended and Tarantino starts pulling
his usual tricks of time refraction in order to expand the story backward as
well as forward, a potentially taut thriller centered around a thin, familiar
story has been lost in a bloat of narrative digressions and self-conscious
dialogue. Tarantino is so in love with his own shadow in The Hateful Eight that narrative developments which could have been
telescoped, trimmed or outright discarded and shaped into a sharp, focused
first hour here take fully two before
the movie wheezes into intermission, with an hour left to endure.

Another issue
is how simultaneously underwritten, in terms of character and the
story, and overwritten, in terms of the movie’s showy dialogue, the script is
revealed to be. This movie may be logy and self-satisfied—a simple dinner scene
with everyone seated at the table seems to spin on forever with precious little
wit on display—but its unrelenting verbosity also veers dangerously close to
self-parody. With the exception of the one played by Samuel Jackson, every
character sounds virtually indistinct from the other, as if the screenplay had
been hijacked by one of the countless QT imitators that have emerged from and
crawled back into the cellar since Pulp
Fiction exploded. Believe me, there was no pleasure to be had in realizing
that the eighth movie by Quentin Tarantino (which the opening credits, in
typically grandiose fashion, helpfully remind us that this is) is the first of
his that could accurately be described as boring.

Amidst the pre-intermission directorial hemming and hawing
which dutifully sets the table for what Tarantino is really interested in
(hint: it involves a lot of viscera),
there are a couple of touchstones at play besides the obvious nods to Agatha
Christie and Sergio Leone. The first that came to mind is Andre De Toth’s
seething, eloquently tense western Day of
the Outlaw (1958), in which citizens of a tiny mountain outpost town have
to put aside their differences when they’re held hostage by a band of criminals.
De Toth uses the interiors of the town saloon, where everyone is holed up, to
create an oppressive claustrophobia, but he knew what that treacherous exterior
terrain was for too. The orchestrated balance between the threat within and the
threat awaiting in the mountains in Day
of the Outlaw made for great drama, a great western. But in The Hateful Eight Tarantino never finds
a way to make the great outdoors a real character—all those gorgeously framed
wide-screen, snow-covered mountains are reduced to a wintry backdrop, glimpsed largely
through windows and doors, as the increasingly gruesome goings-on escalate on
the inside.

The other touchstone is, of course, Tarantino himself. In
form and in its absurd elongation, The
Hateful Eight resembles nothing so much as a feature-and-a-half-length
version of the masterful basement bar sequence in Inglorious Basterds, a sequence its detractors have already claimed
went on far too long. (I was not oneofthosedetractors.) In that magnificently deranged 2009 movie, there was hardly a more
assured half-hour than the one which took place in that basement, where
elements of identity, culture and impersonation (crystalized in the guessing
game around which the sequence is constructed) melded together to create an
impending sense of helpless doom, one in which we began to fear, for the
American and German resistance fighters as well as the German soldiers and the
proprietors of the establishment, that no one could possibly get out of the
situation alive. There’s the same sense in The
Hateful Eight, but the crucial element of empathy is missing, so the
standoff that engulfs the second half of the movie feel less organic, more
perfunctory. We’re set up here not to squirm and project ourselves as viewers
into the situation, but instead to giggle at the presumably clever, nihilistic
inevitability of the director’s dramatic scheme.

And speaking of schemes, as confused as I initially was when
I heard of his now well-publicized plans, I actually admire the perversity of
Tarantino’s decision to use such an outrageously gorgeous format to create
claustrophobic interiors. This is called a director challenging himself--
absolutely nothing wrong with that—and it links Tarantino’s purpose here to the
sort of temporal juggling and rug-pulling strategies that have often
characterized his best work. But it also hints that this self-imposed challenge
might be a way of staving off boredom. As visually arresting as much of The Hateful Eight manages to be, the
more the camera begins to swirl restlessly, especially in the second half, the
more the director seems to be trying to conjure stuff to do with that
super-wide format, and the desperation to justify his indulgence begins bubbling
to the surface.

It’s no stretch to
connect the lunatic beauty of the opening train station sequence of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, with its
gargoyle close-ups of Jack Elam and the station platform that looked as wide as
the American plains themselves, to what Tarantino attempts here. But of course
Leone also knew that such extremity of focus needed to be balanced by vastness
in order to be understood and commented upon. After a while The Hateful Eight begins to take on the
oppressiveness of being locked in a closet at the mercy of a nasty playmate who
doesn’t particularly care whether or not you feel like keeping his violent
games going any longer.

Tarantino has been working overtime in the press in the months preceding this week’s release of The Hateful Eight, dictating the
response to the movie in his own terms like an expert catcher framing balls and
strikes tossed by a wobbly pitcher, hoping the movie might be received in a
manner meeting his approval. (The strategy, if earliest reviews are any
indication, seems to be jelling nicely.) There’s a lot of talk in Tarantino’s
recent interview with Village Voice
critic Amy Nicholson about the movie being about “race, cruelty and justice,”
as well as the director’s own statements about being connected to the zeitgeist
in his script’s apparent reflection of hostilities that have recently exploded
in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, New York and cities all over the country.

Unfortunately, the movie itself makes race a subject in the most puerile and
superficial ways, pushing buttons one might reasonably expect Tarantino would
be growing tired of pushing in the relentless manner of that nasty closet
playmate, but without any residual illumination of furthered understanding. The
use of the word “nigger” in The Hateful
Eight hurts more than it usually does in a Tarantino movie, which is a good
thing, and that’s entirely due to the post-Civil War context in which it’s
being used. But that doesn’t mean you can’t feel the writer-director’s taunting
delight in making audiences squirm over hearing it-- he’s becoming the Gaspar
Noe of racial epithets. It’s a measure of the movie’s basest consideration of
race that one of its biggest laughs, and gasps, comes at the expense of Dern’s
Smithers as he’s told the story of his son’s sexual humiliation and death at
the hands of a very well-endowed black Union soldier. The story is most likely bullshit orchestrated to enrage the old man, and Tarantino only cares
about the shock value, but his audience experiences it as storytelling truth,
and the unleashed power and racial anger with which the general is confronted is
dissipated by the familiar sound of a gunshot.

(Despite inferences in that
interview to the contrary, the best movie in the country now
playing—barely—about race and cruelty and justice, and, oh, yeah, also about
sex, a subject that has never much interested QT, is not The Hateful Eight—not by a long shot—but rather Spike Lee’s
brilliant musical satire Chi-raq, in which Jackson also appears.)

Even more unfortunately, the movie takes the same tittering,
taunting attitude toward its presumptions about its audience’s feelings about
violence directed at women. Tarantino’s insistence in interviews is that
Leigh’s murderous Daisy Domergue is treated just like one of the guys, meaning,
of course, that she is fairly or unfairly subjected to the same sort of
pitiless behavior as anyone else. But it wouldn’t take a latter-day Andrea
Dworkin to notice the delight, shared by many of the Tarantino faithful who
jammed the screening I was in, at every Dolby-enhanced bash in the teeth
Domergue endures. We have only the word of bounty hunter Ruth to assure us that
she deserves every tooth-crushing, skull-threatening blow. Meanwhile, however
perforated or violated their bodies may be at any given moment in The Hateful Eight, the rest of the male
cast is at least not subjected to protracted humiliations to be piled on top of
the circumstances of their grisly deaths. The hysterical fever pitch of
Domergue’s eventual fate suggests a scale better reserved for a genocidal
dictator rather than the murderous leader of a gang of cutthroats who wouldn’t,
Tarantino’s delicious details aside, be out of place in any run-of-the-mill
western.

Daisy spends the entire movie in chains, and we only hear secondhand
about her crimes—with the exception of one sneaky-deadly move, we never see her
do anything but respond to the rest
of the cast in a racially, misanthropically vile manner. Maybe she’s the most
hateful of these eight, but her protracted humiliation still seems bizarrely out
of balance. By that point the movie has succumbed to hysteria anyway, and even
the most interesting of the director’s characters, Major Marcus Warren, has
been reduced to pummeled meat in Tarantino’s outpost abattoir.

But however mangled he might end up, Jackson is the only
performer who emerges from the confines of The
Hateful Eight’s hellish haberdashery with his dignity intact, with Russell
coming in a close second. Both men display their customary commitment and
vitality in animating Tarantino’s world, and they represent its ruptured,
malignant center with the most resonance. But to a man, and a woman, the rest
of the cast, abandoned within the fetishistic conviction of their director’s
design, turn in close to career-worst performances. Dern merely sits and
glowers; Bechir growls unconvincingly under a scraggly beard; Madsen’s
droopy-eyed gunslinger projects less intimidation than narcolepsy; and Tim
Roth, in the absence of Christoph Waltz, has apparently been asked to witlessly
channel the two-time Oscar winner with a dash of Terry-Thomas seasoning to
insure full-scale annoyance. Walton Goggins cartoonishly overplays almost every
aspect of his ex-Confederate soldier’s white entitlement and outrage, so much
so that the power of the character’s eventual move toward racial cooperation,
at least as far as he can take it, is undermined. And speaking of overplaying,
Jennifer Jason Leigh rewrites the book as Daisy Domergue, a performance
seemingly calculated to make Jeanette MacDonald’s Dirty Sally look like subtle character work. Leigh serves here only to
illuminate a writerly conceit-- she stays far away from the sort of brushes
with humanity that might encourage the audience to respond to her confinement
with something other than the cackling glee the director inspires.

As might be obvious from that tall tale spun for the benefit
of General Smithers, The Hateful Eight
is a movie rife with untrustworthy narrators. Is Mannix really the new sheriff?
Are those folks already warming their boots by the fire when Ruth and company
arrive with Domergue who they say they are? Does Bob know where Minnie and the
rest of the outpost regulars might really be? And does anyone know who made that
delicious coffee? As the movie resumes after a 12-minute break, Tarantino’s
voice is heard on the soundtrack catching us up on what happened before the
intermission, and also what happened while we were out for popcorn or making
that much-needed bathroom break. It’s another conceit worth a chuckle, but it
made me wish every single thing in The
Hateful Eight didn’t have quotation marks around it. It’s a shame that the
most untrustworthy narrator of them all turns out to be Tarantino himself, who
abandons his cast in a set that looks as vast as one of Leone’s dusty main
streets in favor of playing with technological toys he’s not entirely sure what
to do with, as least as far as the amplification of story is concerned.

In several ways this movie is a circus of technical control,
an accomplished, veracious illusion of a specific time and of American social
tensions within a genre framework. But it also feels, in comparison to the
genuinely audacious Inglorious Basterds
or Jackie Brown’s consummate directorial
assurance and expression of character, like an especially ugly Ultra Panavision
circle jerk, a scenario constructed primarily for the amusement of its creator
and his fan base, with the rest of us encouraged just to play and cheer along. I
prefer The Hateful Eight over Django Unchained, which allowed genuine
pain and horror to degenerate into wish-fulfillment silliness (a quality Basterds’ wish fulfillment avoided), but
this new movie now has the dubious honor of being the second Tarantino picture
I have no wish to revisit. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing it, of
course, especially if you can manage to see it in in 70mm. But despite it being,
to paraphrase the wisdom of Blazing Saddles’
Olsen Johnson, not precisely a western but certainly the biggest, widest, most authentic
frontier gibberish in town, The Hateful
Eight is the first Tarantino movie that feels something like punishment. That
ought to be no one’s idea of fun.

Robert, I've been wanting to see this, and now is the perfect time! Thanks for that link. And if you see him, please re;lay my congratulations to Kevin Willmott. CHI-RAQ was beyond belief. I loved it. And merry Christmas to you, my friend!

Warning to everyone else: Don't watch the "Rebel" episode linked above until you've seen HATEFUL (unless, of course, you don't intend to). Tarantino's rummaging includes two major plot twists that will spoil HATEFUL somewhat.

Just got back from Hateful Eight and it was the second major disappointment of the movie year for me, the other being Fury Road (though no one seems to agree with me on that one). I speak as someone who enjoyed Django Unchained quite a bit, more than I liked Inglourious Basterds, really. The difference between Django and Eight is that while Tarantino has a feel for the spaghetti western he doesn’t have any feel for the frontier or 19th century America. Rather than putting himself into the period he means to make a version of the period that flatters contemporary sensibilities. (Though the fact that it seems to be a hit would suggest he’s succeeded in that.) His flair for dialogue seems to have deserted him, and taking a ten-minute break just when it’s about to get interesting seems to me a tactical error. I thought the second half redeemed it somewhat, if only because it took Tarantino into something he always understands, movie violence. What it brings to mind is a contemporary movie that truly was willing to get under the skin of the period, the Coen Brothers’ version of True Grit. Of course, they had Charles Portis to work from, but they were willing to embrace what was there. Rather than cooking up a protagonist who will make the viewer comfortable, they have Rooster Cogburn, a character who carries out vendettas under color of authority as a way station between riding with Quantrill and acting as a goon in the Johnson County Wars, while being pointlessly cruel to Indians along the way, but who is physically courageous and deeply loyal to friends.

(About Django, I could readily understand the objections some had to it. There has always been among black Americans a justified resentment about the way white people can horn in on the fun parts of being black without putting up with any of the shit. Now it didn’t bother me because it’s not personal to me, but I can see how it’s a bit thick trying to horn in on the revenge. I could imagine certain persons saying to Tarantino, “Well, if you really want to take part in the revenge why don’t you just get a stick and hit yourself over the head with it?” Knock yourself out, literally.)

A short time after writing the foregoing a penny dropped. Did it occur to you that Samuel L. Jackson's monologue aimed at goading Bruce Dern into a gunfight is actually a vastly inferior reprise of Dennis Hopper monologue that goads the Mafioso into killing Hopper before he can have his son's whereabouts tortured out of him in True Romance? The contrast between revenge and self-sacrifice is telling.

Saw the movie. Agree with the majority of your comments regarding the old " ultra-vi" & the characterizations. Glad to see that you referred to Day of The Outlaw in your review. When I saw those horses galloping through the snow I immediately thought of the horses in DeToth's western slogging through knee deep snow in Day of....

I, too, thought of Day of the Outlaw and fervently wished I were seeing that film instead of the one I was plunked in front of. The 70mm celluloid did its job - it got butts in seats that ordinarily might not be there (mine), but I thought it was totally wasted as a cinematic tool. I agree 100% about the treatment of Daisy, and I thought the flashback to earlier in the day was completely unnecessary because we know what happened. QT was simply going with the mystery structure without really leaving us any tantalizing clues to allow us to figure things out for ourselves. I never assumed Jackson's fantasy of killing Dern's son was real - too many lies in the film for that. Sad sad sad.